A week with SCRUM
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Welcome to my second blogpost, this post will mainly focus on the management side of things. I’m going to explain how we are working with scrum, everything from how we plan each sprint and what is happening on a daily basis. Monday – Sprint planning The team usually gathers on Mondays to discuss what we want to achieve during the sprint. We look in the product backlog (which I wrote about in my previous post), in the backlog we have defined the sprint goals for each sprint. A sprint is where you pull items from the backlog to work on during a sprint, currently the sprint duration is set to one week. After pulling some assets/artifacts from the backlog I ask each person how many hours they might need for each asset/artifact. When 20 hours have been planned per person the sprint planning is done. It is also important to aim for something playable every sprint, for example a new enemy or a new system.  Tuesday to Thursday – daily standups In order to keep everyone working towards the same goal we try to have daily standup meetings every day. A daily standup meeting is a very short meeting of maximum 15 minutes where you ask each member three questions.
Once the questions above have been answered you will know if a member can assist eachother with a specific task. For example “I’m blocked from working further as I need help implementing XX feature into Unity to continue working on my task”. The reason to have daily meetings is to increase the productivity and to get a layer of transparency for the members, every member in the team will know what the others have been working on. The standup meetings are most efficient when done face to face which is the recommended method. This might work great when you have a job where the entire team have the same schedule, but since we have four different minors and four different schedules it is not always possible to have physical meetings. From time to time we have to hold the meetings online which is a very good backup solution. But it makes me feel bad at manging the group since I can’t properly plan the meetings as I have to take few things into consideration, such as the schedule is not always accurate. Another thing I have to take into consideration is one of the members living rather far away, which would be a waste of his day if he had to attend the meeting for 10 minutes just to return home, and that is why we are doing them online most of the time. This marks the end for this post, next week I will be covering how our first sprint review went, what went wrong, what we learnt from it and how we are doing them now.  |